☕️ Coffee 10:30 AM | Lecture 11:00 AM

🎟 Free & open to the public Lisa Small Senior Curator, European Art

Brooklyn Museum of Art

“Cezanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection” In 2025 the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation donated its collection of modern European art to the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Their collection started in the mid-twentieth century with Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani but soon expanded to include significant works by important predecessors such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne. Brooklyn Museum Senior Curator of European Art Lisa Small will discuss the formation of this stellar and idiosyncratic collection and take a closer look at some of its influential artists, all of whom abandoned or transformed old traditions as they explored perception, materiality, pictorial space, and modern life.

Lisa Small was appointed Senior Curator of European Art in 2017 after joining the Brooklyn Museum in 2011 as Curator of Exhibitions. In Brooklyn, she has curated or co-curated the exhibitions Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection (2026); Monet & Venice (2025); It’s Pablomatic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby (2023); Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley (2020); Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper (2019); The Brooklyn Della Robbia (2018-present); Rodin: The Body in Bronze (2017); Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe (2014); and the touring exhibition French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 (2017-21, 2023-27). She served as a coordinating curator for Brooklyn’s presentations of Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving (2019), Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (2017), The Rise of Sneaker Culture (2015), The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (2013), and Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way (2012). Small has also overseen numerous installations of the museum’s European art collection, including most recently Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art (2022-23). In previous curatorial positions at the American Federation of Arts and the Dahesh Museum, she organized exhibitions including Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces  from the Davies Collection; Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts; Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt; and Fantasy & Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré.